No doubt about evolution,

but I think "natural selection" as the primary motor is dubious (see below).  It seems to be mere detailing as opposed to primary "fabrication."   The process I imagine is more holistic and more mysterious than we have imagined--perhaps more than we can imagine.  The below not only offers implicit support for the idea of panspermia, but also makes the concerns about genetically modified foods a little more worrisome...concerns that I heretofore had tended to pooh-pooh...

(From the website Cosmic Ancestry)

8 March 2009
HGT (horizontal gene transfer)  also turns out to be the rule rather than the exception in the third great domain of life, the eukaryotes. So comments science reporter Graham Lawton in New Scientist. Reviewing the challenge to the traditional "tree of life" that horizontal gene transfer presents, he affirms that HGT is already known to drive prokaryotic evolution. We think it also drives eukaryotic evolution, bringing the programs for new systems and features. Perhaps this understanding is not far off:

Other cases of HGT in multicellular organisms are coming in thick and fast. HGT has been documented in insects, fish and plants, anda few years ago a piece of snake DNA was found in cows (my italics).  The most likely agents of this genetic shuffling are viruses, which constantly cut and paste DNA from one genome into another, often across great taxonomic distances. In fact, by some reckonings, 40 to 50 per cent of the human genome consists of DNA imported horizontally by viruses, some of which has taken on vital biological functions.

Lawton reports that Michael Rose, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, goes even further: The tree of life is being politely buried, we all know that. What's less accepted is that our whole fundamental view of biology needs to change.

 Graham Lawton, "Why Darwin was wrong about the tree of life" [html], New Scientist, 21 Jan 2009.
 Viruses and Other Gene Transfer Mechanisms is the main related CA webpage [ What'sNEW about HGT ]
 The Tree of Life is a related CA webpage. "This problem is resolved if evolution makes extensive use of genes that are transfered horizontally."
 Thanks, Dr. Doron Goldberg.

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/